"Cyclops Totem" is incredible sculpture from Tim Biskup's upcoming Barcelona show called "American Cyclops -- New Paintings, Prints & Objects." I wish I could go!

(Click on thumbnail for enlargement)

Bronze, Vinyl & Resin Modular Sculpture
Edition of 44
Apx 25.5” x 11.5” x 6”

July 6th – August 5th, 2006

Opening Reception this Thursday night!

Iguapop Gallery
C/ Comerç, 15
08003 Barcelona
T.Gallery: / +34 / 933 100 735
T.Shop: / +34 / 933 196 813

Link

This week's New Yorker features an engaging article by Christine Kenneally about hemispherectomy, perhaps "the most radical procedure in neurosurgery." In this procedure, an entire side of the hemisphere is removed as a treatment for cancer or chronic seizures. The incredible thing is that if the hemispherectomy is done when a patient is very young, the remaining hemisphere does double duty and the child often develops normally. From the New Yorker:

Many children who have had hemispherectomies at Johns Hopkins are in high school, and one, a college student, is on the dean’s list. The families of these children can barely believe the transformation, and not so long ago neurologists and neurosurgeons found it hard to believe as well. I asked (neurosurgeon George) Jallo if he remembered his first hemispherectomy. “Yes and no,” he said. “I don’t remember the patient. It was more of a ‘Wow.’ I was a resident in training and I assisted in one of the operations. I didn’t realize you could take out that much brain tissue and have someone be so functional and useful in society. What amazes me is that, if someone all of a sudden strokes out half of the brain, more likely than not they are not going to survive. Yet a lot of these people develop their seizures when they’re very young, or in utero, and when you take out half of their brain in one sitting it’s as if they weren’t touched.”

There are wide variations in recovery, and any brain surgery carries grave risks. Many factors affect how well a patient does—age at the time of a condition’s onset, age at the time of the operation, the nature of the condition itself, and the determination of parents and caregivers to maintain an intense schedule of therapy before and afterward. Possibly the greatest danger is posed by the brain’s veins and arteries, which are so numerous and so wildly, individually arranged that they are impossible to map and very hard to control. Excessive bleeding can send patients into shock and then into comas from which they never return, or it can wipe out most brain function. The other conflicting challenge of the surgery is the necessity of making sure that enough tissue is removed. Freeman once saw a small boy who made good progress for six months following a hemispherectomy, after which he began to deteriorate. His doctors discovered that they had left a small piece of the excised hemisphere in the child’s head. It was, said Freeman, no larger than the top joint of his thumb. But the electricity from that piece of neural tissue was enough to compromise the remaining hemisphere. The boy had another operation, a “redo,” as the doctors at Johns Hopkins informally call it, in which the bad piece of brain was removed. After that, he had no more seizures.

Link

kit houses
quik house
retreat homes
modular dwellings
glide house
modular house
some assembly required

Web Zen Home, Store (Thanks Frank!)

Reader comments: Lisa says,

don't forget the beautiful flatpak houses, which, like many houses in this group, focus on green and clean construction.

someone says,

Dont' forget sheds! the sheddie reach enlightenment in their own hand crafted temples. Link.

Snip from a Department of Defense news release:

The Air Force Office of Scientific Research recently began funding a new research area that includes a study of blogs. Blog research may provide information analysts and warfighters with invaluable help in fighting the war on terrorism.

Dr. Brian E. Ulicny, senior scientist, and Dr. Mieczyslaw M. Kokar, president, Versatile Information Systems Inc., Framingham, Mass., will receive approximately $450,000 in funding for the 3-year project entitled “Automated Ontologically-Based Link Analysis of International Web Logs for the Timely Discovery of Relevant and Credible Information.”

“It can be challenging for information analysts to tell what’s important in blogs unless you analyze patterns,” Ulicny said.

Link. Previously on BoingBoing, "Pentagon funding research on data harvesting from Myspace, social networks": Link.

To create the experimental short film "Between You and Me," Patryk Rebisz stitched together over 2,000 individual still photos shot with a Canon 20D camera. Watch the result: Link(thanks David Scott!), update: Mirror (thanks Erik), atomfilms (thanks, Aaron Lampell) YouTube (thanks Eric Gamonal). Many more stitched still movies suggested by BB readers after the jump.

Designers are transforming a 2600-square-footmeter former car showroom into Japan's first robot museum, with a planned opening in October, 2006. Exhibits will cover a wide range of models, from toys to industrial helpers to outer space explorers. Humans and robots will enjoy snacks side by side in a robot cafe on-site. Museum planners anticipate nearly half a million visitors a year. Yomiuri Shimbun article: English, Japanese. (via tobeasian.com, and digitalworldtokyo, thanks Cameron!)

Yesterday a cab driver in NYC hit an 8-year-old kid on a bike. Then the cabbie crashed into a wall, and a mob pulled him out of the car and beat him up. When the cab driver explained that he lost control of the car after his fare hit him in the head with a metal bar to rob him, the mob beat up the passenger and tightened a belt around his neck. Link (Thanks, Rob!)

Following an earlier BoingBoing post with clips from the 1966 German TV space-opera "Raumpatrouille" (Space Patrol) -- well, here are more clips. The show pre-dates Star Trek, and this quick B/W intro excerpt includes deliciously low-tech special effects: clothes irons, shower heads, and dissolving aspirin tablets create the illusion of spaceships gone wild, and planets in distress. Here's the same intro in color, sans English subtitles. Here's another clip in which the ship's commander is strongarmed against better judgement into admitting a science fiction author on board -- and another clip, "Never Trust a Robot." Here's a bunch more clips. Here's the show's IMDB listing. This fan-site for the show states:

The adventures of the Starship Orion were the first- and to date, only space opera project on German TV. There have apparently been several proposals to revive, continue or sequelize the series in the years since the series aired; all of these, sadly, have fallen through, but hope springs eternal. The last try were made by Roland Emmerich in 1996, but was dropped a year later.

This is so awesome. I grew up the child of a trekkie, and have a genetically-ingrained fondness for scifi teevee of this era -- but I'd never heard of "Raumpatroille" before this week.

Update: Slip on your go-go boots and grab your laser gun, here's the highly fruggable "Raumpatrouille" theme song! Link to 2.8MB MP3. Coop sez, "The composer, Peter Thomas, did a lot of cool soundtracks for 60s & 70 Euro films." (thanks, Coop!)

Reader comment: Nate says,

If you're so inclined, there's a link to PDF instructions on how to make a paper model of the ship featured in Raumpatrouille.
Link

I'll be interviewed tomorrow on KPFK Los Angeles, 90.7 FM. Doran and Ric and I will talk about the origins of Boing Boing and Make magazine. I hope you tune it. Link